American politicians have had a tough time getting high-speed rail projects off the ground, but the US could get a helping hand from Japan. Last week, the Japanese government offered to loan the US half of the $8 billion required to create a Super-Maglev route between Washington DC and Baltimore. In other green transportation news, Navia, the world's first commercial driverless electric car hit the streets in Switzerland. With top speeds of 12.5MPH, the car won't be breaking any speed records, but it produces zero emissions and is 100 percent autonomous. And for DIYers, OSVehicle has produced TABBY, an open-source electric car that can be assembled in less than an hour. While many cities are widening highways and trying to figure out how to accommodate more cars, the German city of Hamburg is doing just the opposite. Hamburg just unveiled a plan to phase out the need for cars within the next 20 years. A Palo Alto-based company has given the skateboard an electric upgrade with Onewheel, a self-balancing electric board that's powered by a lithium-ion battery. Future Motion, the company behind the revolutionary skateboard, is currently raising funds on Kickstarter.

Last year was a great one for renewable energy in California: The Golden State doubled its solar capacity in 2013, adding a whopping 1,000 megawatts of solar capacity to the state's homes. And last month, the UK broke a series of wind energy records by generating a total of 2,841,080 megawatt hours -- about 10 percent of the country's total power demand. In other energy news, a combination farm and solar park will set up shop in Japan's Fukushima prefecture, raising questions about how safe it is to raise crops in radiation-contaminated soil. And in the ongoing Fukushima saga, scientists from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency announced plans to conduct a controlled nuclear meltdown in order to learn how to prevent another Fukushima-scale disaster from occurring.